The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

April 16, 2026

“Pharaohs”

Word Count:  750

 

The camel race through the sands down to the Pyramids at Giza was one of the highlights shared with my brothers on our trip to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, ending with us traveling in through Jerusalem’s Mandelbaum gate with machines guns on top.  We admired the treasures of Tutankhamen before Egypt sponsored his worldwide tour.  In Egypt, before moving onto then beautiful Beirut, then Baalbek, we toured the Pyramids, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, the Nile. 

 

Interesting.  Once dominant, yet brutal civilizations turned into playgrounds for adolescent tourists.  My two older brothers discovered another highlight when, chaperoned by our notorious Uncle, they discovered Belly Dancers performing at our hotel.  How fortunate our parents believed in broadening our horizons through travel.  Perhaps they also enjoyed pawning us off onto Unk, pleased to enjoy five weeks without their three sons. 

 

Besides discovering the intestinal necessity of drinking bottle water, we learned how the Pharaohs kept building monuments to celebrate their glorious reigns, seeking immortal fame.  This was more vain ambition than reality.  Each Pharaoh commissioned teams to remove the stone tributes to their predecessor and chisel the statuary to resemble themselves.  So it went throughout the ages.  Bye, bye Rameses.  Bye, bye Cheops.  Erasure by chisels.  Fortunately, we know this today because Egyptian scribes did lots of scribbling.  Archeologists did lots of digging.

 

Prideful Pharaohs kept erecting their statues, temples, memorials.  They, vaunting themselves as deities, used religion to manipulate and abuse their people.  It’s not, however, as if Pharaoh really built any of those memorials, temples, statues.  Nope.  The poor folk, such as the oppressed Hebrews, were forced by Egyptian troops to do the work, entire villages oft relocated to do Pharaoh’s bidding.  There are better ways to be remembered.  Nor was it that Pharaoh paid for all this exorbitant work.  Nope.  The people were taxed so Pharaoh could afford fancy trinkets and sarcophagi.  Pharaoh took the people’s stuff.  Nor did the people have a vote about the use of their stuff. 

 

Did you post your tax forms by April 15?  I did submit my 1040, albeit later than usual given our challenges in settling in here.  I struggled to figure out how to report our Colorado taxes. Colorado forms are more confusing than the Pa-40 or what I filed to DAEITO for Montour County.  Our current county of residence, Larimer, doesn’t tax residents. We applaud the safeguards of decentralized authority.

 

Yes, the Federal Government collected their share of my Pension, Social Security, and Honoraria.  So be it.  I accept my responsibility to pay taxes.  It’s part of our social contract as citizens.  We do have a covenantal obligation to each other which taxes make possible, our social contract that commits us to each other and the success of our society, where non-sectarian law is king and the people rule.  We taxpayers just expect our taxes to be fair and be fairly spent. 

 

How many of us secretly would prefer to treat our taxes like a Chinese menu?  One from Column A, two from Column B, where we select and choose how our obligation is spent.  We do note the implicit hazards however.  I’m sure Quakers would love to exempt paying for the military.  I understand, even agree, how we cannot select which percentage of taxes we pay.  Good thing.  Odds are humanitarian relief would get the short stick, more so than it irresponsibly receives today.

 

Would that we could, however, in times of such blasphemous abuse.  Do we really need to pay guilty Flynn $1.25 million, or, gag, pay restitution to those criminal January 6 police-bashing rioters?  Or fund trashing our White House?  You are steward, not owner.  Or fund his vanity wars?  Or his prison camps?  Or subsidize those para-military brown shirts?

 

Rather, let’s fund childcare. Yes, for making homes affordable. Yes, for space exploration.  Yes, for infrastructure.  Yes, for health care research and support.  Yes for soft diplomacy, upholding the world’s desperate, the least. 

 

Thirteen of us retired pastors meet regularly to discuss important matters, as old codgers do.  We’ve been pastured into religious tourists, mere spectators, like baseball fans assuming their complaints will influence an umpire’s balls and strikes, worsened by how my colleagues also retire themselves from preaching among our struggling congregations. They fret:  How Biblically blunt, how bold, versus compromising and timid, should preachers preach today?  Disappointing.  These times of madness are exactly when our people need the Gospel proclaimed, Holy Words of courage and conviction, justice and repentance, sacrifice and sanity, faith and hope.